Cambodia, 18 Nov 2006 --

So we’ve written two downer posts about Cambodia, which is unfair to such a beautiful country, so I thought I’d make a list of stuff that I like about Cambodia:

  • They have baguettes here! Thanks to the French, good, freshly baked baguettes and even Laughing Cow cheese can be found everywhere. They are delicious.
  • They use US Dollars, which is good and bad. It is bad because it makes us go “It’s only $1…” all of the time, when in Thailand we might have gone “35 baht! That’s outrageous!” But it is cool because at the ATM you can get out US dollars and there is no exchange rate that devalues everything and the surcharge is only $2, which means it is just like taking money out at home. (There aren’t American coins, however. For that they use riel, of which there are 4,000 in one dollar)
  • The Internet is really, really cheap. Right now I’m paying 1,500 riel an hour, which is less than $.50.
  • The language isn’t tonal (as Andris mentioned). My Khmer vocabulary is already much larger than my Thai, and Cambodians understand me when I attempt my phrases. (I can now say in Khmer “Hello”, “How are you?”, “I am fine”, “Thank you”, Numbers 1-9, 100, 1000, “How much is it?”, “Yes”, “No”, “Where is the bathroom?”, “Please”, and “Excuse me”, and some food words)
  • It is really beautiful. The rice patties and the hills and the fields are all gorgeous.
  • Motorbikes are the primary mode of transportation, and they are fun and cheap. In small towns we can rent our own, or in big towns (like Phnom Penh) we can hire someone to drive us around for an absurdly small amount of money. Tuk-tuks are also cheaper than they have been anywhere else, and the guys who drive them don’t hound us as much as they do in some other places.
  • We have cable in our room. It’s lame to admit, but when we have only had TVs in 1 out of 10 rooms, and they have previously only had a maximum of 4 channels, none of which spoke English, having a TV is briefly wonderful. However, that was 4 days ago and now I’m over it.
  • They played a karaoke video on the bus our way from Kampot to Phnom Penh which contained the English language line “I love you, loving you, as the mouse does love the rice!” Now I can sing that to Andris when I feel like being annoying.
Categories Cambodia